Can you expand what Apple has done to count “malicious compliance”?
Limiting USB-C speed to USB2.0 for iDevices that are deemed "not pro", and not having Thunderbolt access despite the hardware could in theory allows it, limiting customers choice to buy the "pro" models for a full experience. And a slightly bigger Lightning cable is still being used in Apple Vision, which is clearly a flying middle finger to the USB-C change.
Apple are starting to commit on the adoption of RCS standard in 2024 too but they still won't support Google's E2E extensions, and instead working with GSMA to make their own encryption standard. The point of RCS is to make communications open, not by trying to make you feel special. Perhaps Apple is still trying to make a segregated market with different colored bubbles just like iMessages.
This might be controversial, but I think it counts: notarization hell (I would like to call it "notorization", combining both notarization and notorious). Starting from Catalina, Apple is forcing all Mac app to be notarized by Apple before use, making the experience of installing custom software other than downloaded from the App Store extremely difficult, in that you have to press a lot of buttons, buried deep in the settings and not as apparent as they should. This makes genuine open-source development for the Mac itself quite hard as it not only need to go through Apple's notarization service before publishing, which is sometimes flaky and not always available all the time, but it also means Apple have control over what apps are allowed simply by revoking your certification, unless you jailbroken your Mac to disable notarization (https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io). Interestingly, Apple could have totally banished checkra1n from running in Mac by revoking the notarization, but Apple doesn't.
I don't think this is true? AIUI a developer can choose to operating using the "old business terms" even in the EU, in which case they don't have to pay the fee. https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/ backs this up by stating that the CTF is an element of the "new business terms".
- They don't allow repair shops to freely order parts, each part must be ordered on-demand, requiring repair shops to pass their customers' personal information to Apple. This adds significant delay to repairs which makes 3rd parties an unappealing option
- They implement digital pairing between parts that require Apple's authorization, which is inaccessible to third party repair shops. In practice this means that you could buy 2 identical brand new iPhones from the Apple store, and they wouldn't work when you swapped their screens.
- They restrict Apple authorized repair shops from performing many useful repairs, I'm not completely up to date on the exact list, but you can watch videos from Louis Rossmann or read materials from other educators on the topic
- They gaslight users asking about data recovery options on their own forum, claiming that any repair shop which offers to recover data is scamming them, and ban actual experts who correct them to say that data recovery is possible
Looking at screen repairs for Samsung Galaxy phones the same security issues arise and there are complaints about Samsung blocking third party repairs due to security concerns.
So are both Apple and Samsung just being greedy or is there more to the issue at hand? I’m inclined to believe a company unless they’ve demonstrated that I cannot trust them.
This tells you nothing. They each have the same incentives. They want you to pay a premium to the manufacturer for repairs, because they're the manufacturer, and because that causes more devices to be uneconomical to repair and so more people have to buy new ones.
This is their stated justification, but it doesn't hold water. The device could refuse to accept a part if the part is from a device that has been reported stolen but they have it refusing to accept a part from a device that hasn't been stolen.
Automatically bricking every device the second the warranty expires is a trade off, because you're "protecting" the user from out-of-warranty repairs. Does that mean it's justified?
Real trade-offs are the epitome of customer choice. Both of the alternatives are available and you choose the one you want. That choice is impaired when products are bound together, so that you can't make your choices independently.
Forcing people into these trade-offs is the evil to be prevented. It's the reason anti-trust laws prohibit tying.
I didn't say trade-offs justify Apple's behavior. But unless proposed alternatives are superior in every regard, we cannot claim that Apple should have done so, or that they have secret motives. Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
> It excuses nothing because it excuses anything.
We have a bigger problem that excuses anything: current economic model. Under this model, actors act the way they do, not because acting so is right, but because they can. Apple can afford to limit third-party repair options, so they do.
Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game. Actors now do whatever they can within the new limits. And, they are very clever in finding new ways of doing what they can, which people call “malicious compliance”.
This is what makes it a weasel word. Nothing is ever superior to something else in every regard. To use this as the standard is to assume that an ulterior motive is never possible, even when there is an unambiguous perverse incentive and the company's rationalization is weak and transparent.
> Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
Which is why it should be the customer and not Apple who chooses whether to make them that way, and the customer should not be forced to make such otherwise-independent choices together.
> Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game.
The premise of a cat-and-mouse game is that the cat is unwilling to eat the mouse.
If the law says that you have to allow competing stores and the company flaunts the law, the next law could say that the same company is not allowed to both make the device and exercise any control over any store, prohibiting the company from operating one themselves. Penalties don't have to be limited to money, they could require the release of internal documentation and source code to facilitate adversarial interoperability. They could simply break the company into a dozen smaller pieces.
Regulations are often terrible because they create inefficiencies which raise prices and, when applied to smaller entities, can destroy them and cause market consolidation. And regulators often pass rules without ever checking up on their actual effects. But "regulations are often wasteful and ineffective" absolutely does not mean that the regulators have no ability to mess up your business -- that is, in fact, the hardest thing to avoid because it happens so easily by accident. The last thing you want is to do anything to cause them to want to crawl inside you and lay eggs.